Adafruit Wave Shield

The Wav Player combines an Arduino with the functionality built into the Wave Shield, with an added audio amp. The Wave Player plays uncompressed 16 bit, mono, 22050 sps, wav files. It's not CD quality but it sounds pretty good if you the played files are formatted correctly. It can change the playback speed, and also replay files very quickly, giving it some elementary special effect and music-making abilities.

Adafruit Wav shield web site
The Wave Shield is a unit that can play audio (specially formatted .wav) files - and it can be controlled by the Arduino.

from the Adafruit website:"Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 16bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It's low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer."
Note however that this is NOT CD-quality sound, and that there other digital sound players that higher quality sound output.

Building the Board!

Tips

Before you begin building the board, I have a few tips that might avoid heartbreak for some students. These are places in which students have traditionally made mistakes putting together the kit.

There are two eight-pin chips in the kit. They look very similar. If you get them mixed up, your kit is guaranteed not to work.

Likewise all three chips have some kind of marking on them, that is matched up with the notch on the board silkscreen. If you get a chip in, in the wrong direction, the board will not work.

Read the text (instead of just looking at the pictures). This will help you get the resistors in the correct place.

It will save you a bit of work if you use wires from your 140 wire kit for the five-wires shown below:Detail of the 5 wires. You may find appropriate wires in the 140 wire kit.

We are making two small changes from the suggested Adafruit build. It will be useful to create the parts you will use for these changes now. In your box you have a strip (1x40) of female headers. Cut off three, two-pin female headers. This will involve sacrificing two pins of your female header. To make a two pin header, with your flush cutters, cut in the middle of the third pin (sacrificing it). Then clean up the edges with flush cutter. As you can see in the photo below the edges don't matter a great deal. Here's a picture:

Insert two, two pin female headers in the places below. Don't do this first - but remember not to put anything in the two holes by the audio jack. Here is a picture of how it will look with headers in place.

Is there any special format for the file names of individual sound files?

Do you have any example wav files that I can use?'''

All of the sound files for the examples included with the WaveHC library are in the wavehc20110919 folder, from which you moved the WaveHC library to the root level of the libraries folder. Copy them out of the wavehc20110919 folder to your SD card.